Chapter 16: Before the Sky Turns Grey
Dawn threatened the horizon long before any light touched the world.
Aiden knew because the air changed.
It wasn't brighter.
It wasn't warmer.
It simply felt… thinner, like something enormous had inhaled and was holding its breath.
And that was enough.
He opened his eyes.
The pup stirred instantly, as if tied directly to his heartbeat. Its tiny body vibrated with faint static, fur lifting in slow waves along its spine. Aiden stroked its head gently.
"I know," he whispered. "We're going."
Fog still clung to the rise, thicker toward the marsh's edge, thinner where the trees leaned against cold wind. The world was trapped between night and dawn, suspended in a colorless space where shadows lingered longer than they should.
Most of the caravan lay in that uneasy almost-sleep between exhaustion and fear. A few hunters sat upright, bleary-eyed, hands resting on weapons; others had slumped despite themselves, chins on chests, breath fogging in quiet puffs.
Aiden stood carefully.
His legs were stiff, sore, and still recovering—but they obeyed. He'd slept only a handful of hours, but the storm in his veins helped more than he wanted to admit. The pup shifted in his arms, then curled into his cloak with a tired little huff, sparks dimming.
Myra was already awake.
She leaned against a twisted trunk at the edge of the rise, arms crossed, hair tugged by the breeze as she watched the eastern sky where nothing yet showed.
She didn't look surprised to see him.
"You feel it too," she said quietly, not taking her eyes off the horizon.
"Yeah," he answered. "Like the world's… waiting."
"No light yet," she murmured. "But the sky's thinking about it."
"That's the window the fox meant."
"Then we move before it changes its mind."
She pushed off the tree and headed toward the middle of camp. Aiden followed, adjusting his cloak, careful not to jostle the pup.
On the way, they passed one of the hunters, a scar-cheeked woman half-dozing with her back to a cart wheel. Her eyes snapped open at their footsteps.
"Already?" she rasped.
"Before dawn," Myra said. "Spread it. Quietly."
The woman nodded once and moved off, shaking another hunter's shoulder as she went.
Nellie was the last of their little trio to wake.
She startled upright when Myra knelt and touched her shoulder.
"What—? The monsters—? Is it time?" Nellie blurted, curls sticking out in every direction.
"It's time," Myra said softly. "Up. Pack. We're leaving before first light."
Nellie scrubbed at her face with both hands. "I-I'm up. I can walk. I'm okay."
"You're doing more than walking," Aiden said. "You're staying close to us."
Her fingers clamped around the strap of her satchel, knuckles white. "Okay," she whispered. "I'll keep up. I promise."
Garrik was awake too—Aiden doubted he'd really slept at all. He stood in the center of the crushed grass circle, spear butt planted in the dirt, watching the edge of the rise like it might start climbing toward him.
When he spoke, his voice was low but carried.
"Anyone who can stand, stand. Anyone who can carry, carry. We move in five."
Muffled groans rose, quickly swallowed. The word move did what nothing else could. People tore themselves out of cloaks, out of thin sleep, out of the illusion that this rise was anything but borrowed safety.
Carts creaked as wheels were checked and shifted. Leather straps tightened. Someone cursed softly when a knot refused to budge. Another person laughed once—too loudly, too sharply—then cut themselves off when a hunter glared.
Aiden helped a man wrestle a crate back into place on a wagon bed, then steadied an older woman with a twisted ankle as she limped toward her family. Myra moved between small knots of people, checking that no one lingered behind carts or sat frozen with their head in their hands.
"On your feet," she murmured to a boy barely older than herself who sat staring at the ground. "You can collapse later. Right now you walk."
He looked up, eyes ringed with red, then nodded shakily and grabbed his pack.
Nellie moved in a quick, small circuit, handing out the last of her night-herbs and bandage strips to those still bleeding.
"This one dulls pain," she whispered to a man with his arm in a makeshift sling. "Don't use too much. It makes you dizzy."
He pressed the herb to his lips like a blessing.
Behind everything, under everything, the rise trembled faintly.
Aiden felt it through the soles of his boots.
Not like footsteps. Not like wind.
Like something below shifting its weight.
Like the marsh rolling over in its sleep and remembering it had teeth.
He swallowed. "We need to move—now."
"We're moving," Garrik snapped, echoing his tension. "Form up!"
The caravan compressed into a thin, controlled line—hunters at the front and rear, families and carts in the middle, the weakest pulled toward the center where more hands could catch them if they stumbled.
Aiden, Myra, and Nellie fell in near the lead, just behind Garrik.
The hunter captain pointed his spear toward the north—a darker notch in the fog, where trees hunched close together and the ground sloped away from the marsh's open edge.
"That's our way," he said. "Stay tight. Stay quiet. If you hear wings or water—run faster."
"W-wings?" Nellie squeaked.
"Don't ask," Myra muttered. "Just keep your feet moving."
They left the rise.
The faint sense of height dropped away with each step as they descended back into the clamp of fog. The world tightened around them, the sounds of the camp replaced by the soft squelch of boots and the occasional creak of wood.
This fog was different from the marsh's lowest mists. It had less stink, less rot. But it was thicker, as if the air itself didn't want them seeing too far ahead.
"Stay close," Aiden said quietly.
Nellie's hand found the back of his cloak. Myra walked at his other side, close enough that their shoulders brushed when the path narrowed.
The marsh was not silent.
Behind them, somewhere in that smothering grey, something massive groaned like a submerged mountain turning in its sleep.
The ground shivered.
Nellie jerked, fingers tightening on his cloak. "Was… was that the leviathan?"
"Maybe," Aiden said. "Or something that wants us to think it is. Don't look back."
He didn't.
Myra didn't either.
"No sudden running," she said under her breath. "If we bolt, half the line will trip. We keep walking. Let Garrik set the pace."
Garrik moved steadily, step after step, eyes always searching ahead. The path was barely more than a thread of slightly firmer ground between darker puddles.
Hunters near the front whispered to each other in low, clipped exchanges.
"Left branch still flooded?"
"Last time I came through, yeah."
"Any sign of burrowers?"
"Too cold. They're sleeping."
Aiden focused on putting his boots where Garrik's had gone, on not thinking about what burrowers meant.
Sometimes the fog parted just enough for him to glimpse silhouettes: the outline of a broken statue half-swallowed by roots, the curve of an old roadstone cracked and tilted, the long, skeletal fingers of a tree reaching over the path like it wanted to pluck them off the ground.
The System hummed very softly at the back of his mind:
[Environmental Hazard: High]
[Beast Activity: Diffuse / Distant]
[Primary Threat: Tracking…]
He wanted to ask it what primary threat meant.
He didn't. He was afraid of the answer.
As they pushed deeper between trees, a subtle change crept into the air.
The stink of rot grew weaker, replaced by something drier. The ground underfoot was still soft, but there were more roots, more stubborn patches of grass, more knobby protrusions of stone.
"The trees are thicker," Nellie whispered, almost like she was afraid of breaking something fragile.
"Good," Myra said. "Less open space for big things to swim in."
Somewhere to their right, something splashed half-heartedly, then went wonderfully, mercifully still.
They walked.
Seconds blurred into minutes. Minutes into an hour that felt like it was being stretched thin over the shape of a lifetime.
Feet dragged. Breaths grew harsh. Even Garrik's shoulders slumped a little.
"Break?" someone called hoarsely from the middle of the line.
Garrik didn't turn. "You want to sit and invite the marsh to sit on you too?" he called back. "You can rest when the ground stops smelling like bad soup."
A weak laugh rippled through the line. It wasn't really funny. But it was something to hold onto.
Aiden found himself counting steps between each deeper tremor from behind.
Fifty.
Seventy.
A hundred.
Each time, the distant groan of shifting weight rolled through the fog, a reminder that something huge still moved in the marsh they'd left.
"Do you think it can… climb?" Nellie whispered.
"Let's not find out," Myra replied.
The fog thickened again as they reached a denser stand of trees. Branches knotted overhead, leaving only narrow cracks of slightly lighter grey.
Aiden's instincts prickled.
Not with immediate danger.
With direction.
Possibility.
A path that felt like it shouldn't exist, but did, just for this moment between night and true dawn.
Follow the stones that grow like teeth.
He leaned toward Myra. "We need to watch for rocks. The tall ones. Ragged."
She nodded once, eyes sharpening. "Garrik's looking too," she murmured.
Up ahead, the hunter captain had slowed. His gaze flicked between the ground and the shadows, searching for something only half-remembered.
"Come on," he muttered under his breath. "You ugly old things… where are you…"
Aiden's pulse quickened.
The sky was still dark, but some sense just behind his eyes told him the fox's window was shrinking. The air tasted less stale and more… thin. Hungry.
Then—he saw them.
At first he thought they were more broken statues. Then he realized they grew out of the earth, not on top of it.
Stones, taller than a man, jutted from the ground in jagged rows—slabs and shards serrated at the top, leaning at strange angles like shattered fangs. Moss and lichen clung to them, but beneath the growth their surfaces were too smooth to be natural, too deliberate to be accident.
They framed a shallow dip in the forest floor, forming a crooked corridor down into a narrow hollow.
"The teeth," Myra breathed. "That's got to be it."
Garrik stopped just long enough to confirm with his eyes, then jabbed his spear toward the descent.
"That's it," he said. "Everyone inside. One line. No straying between the stones."
No one argued.
The caravan funneled into the dip.
The ground sloped gently at first, then steeper, mud sucking at boots before giving way to firmer, darker soil. The stones on either side loomed higher as they descended, some almost meeting overhead in jagged arches.
The air changed again.
Sharper.
Cooler.
Metallic.
The smell hit Aiden's tongue like a tang of bitten iron.
Nellie wrinkled her nose. "It tastes funny," she whispered.
"That's new," Myra muttered. "I've never tasted air before."
"It's the hollow," Aiden said, though he wasn't sure how he knew. "We're inside it."
The System flickered in the corner of his vision:
[Boundary Crossed: Hollow of Broken Teeth]
[Beast Presence: Low]
[Instinct Warning: Anomaly]
[Advantage / Risk Balance: Unstable]
Unstable.
Of course it was.
The teeth-stones hummed faintly. It might have been wind, or the distant grumble of the marsh, or the after-echo of the fox's warning lodged in his head. Or it might have been real—some deep vibration responding to the storm in his chest and the sleeping spark in his arms.
The pup's ears twitched.
It didn't wake.
But it pressed closer against him, as if something in this place made its instincts curl tighter.
"Keep moving," Garrik called quietly. "Do not stop until the ground climbs again. If you trip, shout. If you see anything brighter than your own lantern, look away first and describe it after."
A few nervous chuckles slipped out.
They walked between the teeth.
The dip grew deeper, but never so deep that they lost all sense of the trees above. Branches arched over in skeletal webs. Twice, Aiden ducked under a root cutting across the path like a half-buried rib.
Every sound was sharper here. The creak of a cart axle. The crack of a twig underfoot. The soft, wet cough of a man trying not to make noise.
"Does it feel… quieter to you?" Nellie whispered. "Not… safer. Just like the noise can't get in all the way."
"It's because whatever lives out there doesn't like this place," Myra said. "Or can't get through it right."
"Why?"
Myra hesitated. "Ask Aiden's weird sky-friend later."
He couldn't even argue.
The hollow felt wrong and right at the same time. Every instinct he had screamed that this place wasn't for humans. And yet another equally stubborn instinct insisted that between wrong for humans and food for marsh monsters, he'd pick the first.
Behind them, beyond the lip of the rise they'd left, the marsh groaned again.
Closer.
The sound rolled through the fog and into the stones, a low, muffled roar like the world itself grinding its back against old rock.
The teeth vibrated.
Nellie flinched hard enough to almost lose her footing. Aiden caught her elbow.
"Easy," he said. "You're okay. One step at a time."
"I-I'm fine," she said through gritted teeth. "Just… don't let go."
"Wasn't planning on it."
Myra glanced back toward the way they'd come. The path behind was already swallowed in mist, the rise hidden.
"Do you think it knows we're gone?" she asked quietly.
"I think," Aiden said, "it knows we're not where we're supposed to be."
Garrik didn't turn. His voice was flat. "Doesn't matter what it knows. Matters what it can reach. And this is as far as I've ever seen the marsh stretch a hand."
The line moved on.
The teeth-stones closed around them, some leaning together so narrowly they had to turn sideways to squeeze through. In places, iron-colored veins ran through the rock, glinting faintly in the half-light.
"Air tastes stronger," Nellie murmured. "Like when I cut myself and put the knife in my mouth by reflex. Metal and… storm."
Myra shot Aiden a look. "Sound familiar?"
"Maybe a little," he said.
He could feel it too.
The hollow pressed on his senses like a question.
It didn't push him away.
It didn't welcome him.
It simply… noticed.
The pup shivered, then settled again, curling deeper against his chest.
Aiden shifted his grip, cradling it more securely.
"We're almost clear," Garrik said quietly. "You feel that? The ground's changing. Drier. We're angling away from the open marsh."
He was right.
The mud underfoot thinned, replaced by firmer earth and scattered patches of rock. Somewhere ahead, unseen but sensed, the land began to rise.
Aiden tried not to think about what might be standing on the marsh's edge above the hollow, watching the spot where their trail had simply… stopped.
Curiosity prickled under his skin.
He didn't look back.
He didn't need to.
The storm in his blood already gave him too much.
The far end of the hollow curved faintly upward, teeth-stones bowing outward, giving them a glimpse of sky through the branches again.
Not blue.
Not yet.
Just a slightly lighter bruise of grey pressing against the canopy.
The first color of almost-dawn.
Aiden lifted his head, heart thudding.
Behind them, in the direction of the marsh, the fog at the horizon bulged.
He couldn't see details—only a darker mass rising beneath the blanket of white, like a hill deciding it didn't want to be part of the ground anymore.
The air vibrated.
Not just sound—impact.
The marsh answered the sky's first hint of light with a low, breaking roar.
Nellie's fingers dug into his sleeve.
Myra's hand tensed on her hilt.
Garrik did not look back.
"Eyes forward," he said, voice like stone. "The swamp can rage behind us all it wants."
The hollow swallowed them deeper between its teeth as the roar rolled over the trees.
And the only direction left to run was forward.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Alright, real talk for a second.
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